Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future of education is plain text

simplystatistics.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 349 posts

Re: The future of education is plain text

#251

Post by JohnHammersley »

hobs wrote: post #239
JohnHammersley wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in adding LaTeX to that list, you might like to try Overleaf [1] -- it's an online collaborative LaTeX editor we built to try to lower the learning curve (I'm one of the founders). It includes a rich text mode for easier collaboration with non-LaTeX users [2], and you can also write in Markdown if you like :) [3]. Feedback always appreciated if you do give it a try, thanks. [1] https://www.overle…

Thank you so much for Overleaf, as a new user, its great! I really like how easy it is to experiment with the LaTeX formatting (something I wasnt super familiar with) and immediately see the output. I had someone send me their resume template on overleaf and it was super easy to get a similar product with my personal touch. The only feedback I would have is it was a little awkward to do folders within folders (this w…

Thanks for the feedback - great to hear you've been finding it useful and yes, improving the file tree is definitely on our list.

Good luck with your future projects!

Re: The future of education is plain text

#252

Post by [deleted] »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #241
ajarmst wrote: post #240

I find anything but plain text irritating when writing (I dislike attempts to merge the creative process of writing with the only peripherally related creative processes of orthography, layout and printing). The WYSIAYG editor "revolution" and the associated explosion of opague untranslatable binary file formats did us all a huge disservice. My students learn fairly quickly that my warning that assignments submitted…

>only peripherally related creative process of orthography, layout and printing I think you should rethink this a little, constraining or adapting your medium will provide you with different results that can be better or worse, depending on your goal of writing.

[deleted]

Re: The future of education is plain text

#253

Post by quantum_magpie »

JBorrow wrote: post #66

I must say that I agree - to a certain extent. They (lecture notes) actually already are (at least in HE Physics education) as everything is written in LaTeX. They are just not distributed that way. I've been working on hacking together a demo of some stuff that turns those original LaTeX documents into a little (static) website. We've had pretty positive reviews from students so far - it's searchable (which is key),…

This site looks and feels amazing! Great work. Please share your conversion demo once it's available!

Re: The future of education is plain text

#254

Post by JetSpiegel »

gkya wrote: post #171
canes123456 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A PDF without text still kind of works. It not accessible which is a big problem. However, this happens when there is a mistake somewhere in the chain. This is all too common, but what is the correct way to handle tables, diagrams, formulas, images, graphs, links in plain text. There is no right way to do these things in plain text. You will eventually need html or pdf for education.

Also: PDFs have pages and thus page numbers, which are an important tool. When working with long texts you need reference points to share your state .

That's what hyperlinks are. They even have the better property that they don't break if you change the font size for the whole text.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#255

Post by JetSpiegel »

xj9 wrote: post #82
calinet6 wrote: post #56

And the future of operating systems is the command line. We deserve better than this reductionist thinking. Constraints can breed innovation; but they can also just constrain.

it is, but computer isn't smart enough for the future to happen yet

The computer is, PEBKAC is still the name of the game.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#256

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #122
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #46

Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: - Notepad - Microsoft Word - PDF - Twiki - Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML - JIRA - Raw HTML - Markdown (several flavors) With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the co…

> With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc. And plain text is itself a nightmare to parse and do anything beyond reading it as a block.

[deleted]

Re: The future of education is plain text

#257

Post by theoh »

IshKebab wrote: post #73

Great let me just illustrate this mathematical equation with a diagram. Oh.

Yes, the idea that raw ascii or unicode text is somehow an adequate replacement for the capabilities of the printed page is completely ridiculous, but here we are discussing it. (And CSV, as recommended in the linked article, is a poorly-defined nightmare of incompatibilities. Not a good recommendation.)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#258

Post by dheera »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #46

Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: - Notepad - Microsoft Word - PDF - Twiki - Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML - JIRA - Raw HTML - Markdown (several flavors) With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the co…

obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: The future of education is plain text

#259

Post by [deleted] »

doublerebel wrote: post #67

Plain text: so that no one can own the presentation method. Plain text: so that no one can own the distribution method. Plain text: so that no one can own the creation method. Plain text: so normal people can recover data even when partially corrupted. Plain text: so you aren't forced to see jarring ads. Plain text: so that there are no tracking pixels. Plain text: because connecting information with hyperlinks doesn…

[deleted]

Re: The future of education is plain text

#260

Post by jhbadger »

vog wrote: post #48
sharpercoder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AsciiDoc has a serious adoption problem compared to MarkDown.

Why is that? Given the comparatively low quality of Markdown (as a language), isn't GitHub the only reason why Markdown gets pushed so much? If GitHub chose AsciiDoc instead of Markdown as their base, we would be in a better position now.

Markdown is also what RStudio uses for markup of comments in notebooks, so it is very common in the bioinformatics and statistics worlds.
Post reply on HN